At AMD, we believe in supporting transparent, independent coverage that helps customers
make informed decisions. Ah, do you then?
Well then, why the HE Double Hockey Sticks didn't you want to send us an 8Gig version
of the 9060XT? Oh, it was based on regional market demand.
Well, the last time I checked, we have a global audience, so unless there's no demand for
a review in the region of Earth, I don't really get that explanation.
No, the more likely reason is that you were afraid that we would roast your 5060 competitor
as hard as we roasted the 5060, so you put off sending it until we wouldn't have time
to test it before the embargo. But we can talk more about your shenanigans later.
First, the 9060XT 16Gig promises to be the best value card with a 60 in the name in about
half a decade. We're matching the 5060Ti 8Gig in performance, outdoing it with double the VRAM and beating
it on price, which sounds great, but it also might not be the right thing to buy.
And I'll tell you why after I tell you something you do want to buy from our sponsor.
1080p is both the most popular gaming resolution today and the most popular excuse for shipping
knee-capped 8Gig cards, like the 8Gig RTX 5060, which we purchased for this review since
NVIDIA really doesn't seem to want reviewers testing those.
But with all that said, the truth is, if you are playing games at 1080, AMD and NVIDIA are
probably right, it is enough for now.
But remember guys, this is the minimum spec for new AAA titles, and these are cards that
cost $300 plus.
Anywho, across our suite of games that exist today, the 9060XT performs admirably, but not
spectacularly, keeping up with the 5060Ti cards which cost at least $30 more and discerting
a commanding lead over the anemic 5060 non-Ti.
It outperforms its last-gen counterpart, the 7600XT, by more than 30% most of the time,
which is enough to highlight how truly awful that card was, but not enough to make the
Intel Arc B580 look like a bad value, Intel's really standing out with their battlemage architecture.
Of course, we would have loved to give you guys 8Gig numbers, so this is merely conjecture,
but at 1080p raster, you can expect pretty much identical performance numbers because
it's essentially the same card, sans half of the memory.
If we find time to throw one on the bench, we will have that linked at LTT Labs down below.
Okay, so what about the value proposition?
Well, that depends. See, the 9060XT actually comes in three variants.
The 8Gig one that didn't arrive on time, the base-clocked 16GB model, and the OC variant
from Sapphire that was sent to us. This one has higher power draw and boosted clocks compared to 16GB non-OC cards, but
other than that, all of the variants are built on the exact same Navi 44 GPU based on AMD's
RDNA4 architecture. This new architecture brings a bunch of improvements that you can get a deep dive into in our 9070
series review, but here's the short version.
Big improvements in ray tracing and AI that bring these cards up to speed, almost with
NVIDIA in non-traditional forms of rendering, and a host of other improvements that allow
them to sometimes even beat NVIDIA in traditional raster.
Despite its similar-sounding name, though, these new GPUs are substantially cut down
compared to their bigger brothers, with about half as many compute units as the 9070XT.
Interestingly they did this, which means we have half the memory bus width, but benefit
from keeping the same IO and 16 PCIe Gen 5 lanes.
That last point is key for gamers who are holding on to older systems where a buy-aid
interface like on some of NVIDIA and Intel's cards can result in a measurable performance
loss. Oh, there is one thing I lied about on the IO.
Interestingly, this card only has three display outputs.
Most of you declared this to be a non-issue after the announcement, but it is the first
time that I've seen a $300 card in years that didn't have four outputs.
I digress, though. To compensate for the cut-down die, AMD bumped up the clock speed so that you'll get a bit
more than literally half of the performance of the 9070XT, which is also why the card
draws a bit over half the power, in line with the 5060TI 8G that AMD positions it against.
And in combuster, our card seems to be right in line with the 5060TI 8G, but interestingly,
the story is a bit different in F124.
In this racing game, AMD's latest pulls an average 174W with a maximum spike of 225W.
By comparison, the 5060TI 8G averages around 121W.
We don't know if this behavior will show up in every game, but this is enough for us
to recommend going for a slightly beefier power supply than the 450W unit that AMD recommends.
Thankfully, this is still relatively low power draw, meaning that these cards are pretty
easy to tame, and even loaded by a power virus like combuster, our cards stay both cool
and quiet. Let's talk 1440P gaming.
AMD claimed 6% better gaming performance than the 5060TI 8G at 1440, but looking at our
raster results, we just don't see it.
They score a couple of wins in LNWake 2 and Last of Us Part 1, but is it really that impressive
of a win when NVIDIA's 8G cards can't complete the test and you just didn't submit your
8G card on time for testing? Especially when we factor in that the 9060XT 16G trails behind the 5060TIs and honestly
doesn't even look that stellar against the 5060 in the remainder of our games here.
If you're wondering, by the way, about how the 5070 compares to all of this, we didn't
retest that card for this review, so we didn't want to include stale numbers, but it's a
little worse than the 9070 non-XT from back when we reviewed that.
Moving on to ray tracing. Despite the massive leap in RT performance that came with RDNA4, AMD is still unable
to match their direct NVIDIA competitors. In 1080P RT, the 9060XT falls well behind the 5060TI 8G in our suite of tests, which
is sad, but what really jumped off the charts to me is NVIDIA's embarrassing loss here
with the 5060 not even able to keep up with the 4060TI.
I thought they had improved the ray tracing on Blackwell.
What the heck happened? And in 1440P RT Cyberpunk, things don't look much better.
Maybe we can find a happier story in productivity? No, not really.
I mean, the nice thing about having 16 gigs of memory, if you do, is that it allows you
to dip your toes into AI without being as limited. I mean, look at how all the 8Gig cards fumble as we load up a larger model.
But even with 16 gigs, AMD isn't even close to NVIDIA in terms of performance in our machine
learning tests. It turns out, haha, software support is important.
And that only becomes more clear as we move beyond AI to Blender.
This goes brrrrrrr and HIP goes brrrrrrrrr.
Adjusting focus to content creation, though, we see big improvements genover gen from AMD
and they even beat NVIDIA in DaVinci Resolve, though they trailed behind in the more popular
Premiere Pro benchmark. Alright, well that's the performance.
So this has been a big load of meh so far.
But hey, getting 16 gigs of VRAM and 5060TI-ish performance for a theoretical $30 discount?
That's something. It's just, it's tough to justify the $50 jump over the 5060, whose price is tough to justify
over a kick in the groin. I mean, to AMD's credit here, FSR4 has made huge strides, meaning that other than multi-frame
gen, which a lot of you aren't that into, AMD has near parity on most of the features
that gamers care about. Even their video encoder is almost as good as NVENC these days.
They just need to work on third-party support for all of this stuff.
So at the end of the day then, I don't know, I'm left kind of frustrated.
In recent years, AMD has slowly but surely caught up to NVIDIA in terms of performance
and features, but they've also caught up in terms of their crappy behavior.
Last gen, the 7600XT had 16 gigs and the 7600 non-XT had 8 gigs of VRAM.
It was super easy to tell what you were buying from the name of the product.
This time around, they've lumped both cards together with the sameXT name, and then at
the same time, as far as we can tell, intentionally made it more difficult for media to review
the 8 gig version, which could lead to consumer confusion.
So AMD, your commitment to the press words, kind of meaningless at this point.
And speaking of meaningless promises, you still haven't managed to get your previous
cards into the sales channel anywhere near MSRP, which means you've effectively given
away any credibility that you might have had there too. So bottom line, if you have 350 bucks or more to spend, you can buy a 9060XT, I guess, but
I wouldn't recommend the 8 gig one if you want to get a longer lifespan out of your
card or you want to upgrade your monitor to 1440p, and whichever one you choose, just
don't smugly tell yourself that you're supporting the good guy, because AMD's actions speak
much louder than their words, and they seem content to just draft behind NVIDIA, both
in good ways and bad, rather than aggressively jump out in front to delight PC gamers who
don't have 800 plus dollars to spend on a GPU.
AMD, this was kind of your shot. NVIDIA is super distracted at the moment, and unless you do more, your GPU division is going
to continue to only resonate with a small niche of users who don't mind owning a punching
bag. And I would deserve to be punched in the bag if I didn't segue to our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out our review of the 9070 and 9070XT, it dives
a little bit deeper into the architectural changes with our DNA4.